On my way to the library to work on this column, I passed two men and a woman sitting outside by the dumpsters in the rain. Their clothes were ragged and dirty and they were sitting on a concrete parking divider to avoid the puddles.
“What did we get this time”? one man asked the group, pulling items out of a grocery bag.
“Looks like more canned fruit,” said the lady, inspecting a can of mandarin oranges.
On my walk, I continued to think about them, and as I checked the Cap Times, I found that FoodShare, the program that likely provided them with groceries, has been caught in the Walker administration’s crosshairs.
To try and save a buck, the governor first tried to cut these public workers’ jobs and privatize them. Now, with the United States Department of Agriculture looking to intervene on this technically illegal move, Gov. Scott Walker will have to eliminate the private workers’ jobs and transfer their workload to the strained public employees that remain.
As we have previously seen from this administration, slash-and-burn budget cuts have lead to lost jobs in an already floundering economy. Once again, Walker attempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, attacking a program that benefits Wisconsin’s workers and poor.
It all started in 2009 under former Gov. Jim Doyle. FoodShare, a county-specific government-funded food assistance program and its Enrollment Services Center were a part of the BadgerCare Plus Core Program. The program was created to provide affordable health insurance to childless adults earning less than $21,000 annually.
Due to the high demand for services, Doyle expanded FoodShare into the private sector to help accommodate those in need. However, federal guidelines “prohibit private, or vendor, staff from deciding an applicant’s eligibility for food assistance,” so these private jobs were non-discretionary ones such as scanning documents. Overall, 270 public workers and 425 private workers were employed to handle 99,000 food assistance cases and manage $42 million in aid from the USDA in 2010.
However, penny-pinching Walker and his budget busting cronies looked to eliminate spending wherever possible, and in this case, in feeding the poor. At first the best way to cut corners seemed to be complete privatization of the system, which would have cost about 270 public employees their jobs.
Not only does this further demonstrate Walker’s vendetta against the public sector, but it also seems dangerous to have just any private employee with a grudge or a chip on their shoulder deciding whether or not you get to eat that night.
However, the USDA put the brakes on this plan. If Walker continues on his route, he is in danger of losing the millions in federal aid the government provides in addition to the approximately $1 billion they already give in food assistance to Wisconsin residents.
“The state right now is not in compliance [with federal law],” said Alan Shannon, a spokesperson with the USDA’s regional office in Chicago in a Cap Times interview. “It’s that simple.”
So now, instead of 270 public employees being out of work, 319 private employees could be jobless by March. That leaves about 376 people to do the work that 695 people did under Doyle. According to the Cap Times, “Dane County employees now will be in charge of an additional 9,000 to 10,000 cases.” Maybe it’s sometimes the case that a few people could more efficiently do the work of many, but at 10,000 cases more per year, efficiency isn’t likely Walker’s main consideration.
Not only are the cuts devastating to the families of the 319 workers laid off, they are also damaging to those receiving assistance from the program. These cuts mean fewer jobs, but they also mean fewer distribution centers, which will go from in-county to a few scattered centers across the state.
Important players in the program have agreed: Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, officials with the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families and Disability Rights Wisconsin have criticized the move.
Maureen Fitzgerald, the FoodShare project director for the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee, criticized the privatization of the program by sharing a customer service horror story with the Cap Times: A recipient “came to [FoodShare] after receiving a letter with a number to dial for assistance [but], rather than connecting the person to the Enrollment Services Center … [it] connected them to DirecTV, a satellite cable service.”
With his one-track mind on the budget, Walker has not only decreased quality of service for Wisconsin’s poor, he has also endangered the jobs of the working class – the opposite of what he promised in his campaign. Balancing a functioning assistance program is a delicate, surgical task. Yet if a surgeon makes a mistake, he or she doesn’t keep cutting to fix it. For the sake of food and jobs, why would we accept the same from our governor?
Taylor Nye ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in biological anthropology and Latin American studies.
